who, all in spangles,

"Rides as through the towns they go Sees the sidewalks full of children, Hears their laughter far below, And she wonders, Little Mollie,

Why they laugh and clap and cheer; Serious work it is to Mollie

Bright and piquant to appear, —

so it must be with all these infant prodigies who are made to earn their bread with their pathetic small accomplishments, could the tale of their distorted little lives be told. It is hardly to be expected otherwise than that such a life should have its hardening, sin-tending, soul-blighting effect, even on a seven-year child.

"Young Americus" was a part of the glittering retinue in the gorgeous and fairylike spectacle of the Naiad Queen. All the holiday afternoon he had delighted the school children, come out to hear him in radiant crowds; delighted them while he stood in silent pain, wondering perhaps like little Mollie, why they laughed, and clapped and cheered. The plain prose says that when he left the stage the manager noticed that he looked fatigued, and asked if he was ill. He replied that he had a pain in his heart.

He was kindly allowed to stay away from the evening performance. He crept quietly away to bed. At midnight one, waking, heard a tiny voice through the darkness and the words were these: "Gracious God, make room for another little child in heaven." Afterwards the silence remaining unbroken, he was spoken

That is all we are told. But if the story does not live in literature, it will be because there are no poets left.

The poem by Mrs. Patterson in this number will be recognized by many as a tribute to the memory of Mr. George W. Bazin, who was identified with the Universalist Publishing House fifty years ago, and was, we believe, the first printer and publisher of this magazine. In those days not only the editors and patrons of the printed organs of the new sect, but even the workmen, from first to last, were of the

household of faith, and full of zeal for its advancement; for adversity makes close "Charlotte" set her own poems friends. at the composing-case in the old "Trumpet" office; Mr. Bazin wrote his own replies to scurrillous correspondents. The face of the venerable man of eighty years would light as he said with unction, "I was happy when I had one of those great articles of Father Ballou's to set up." Eloquent words were spoken at his funeral of his encouragement and assistance to young ministers, in those trying and uncertain days of the early warfare. There is something eminently satisfactory in the thought of service like that,-intelligent, zealous, heartfelt, pervading the very types with the common spirit of consecration to a great cause. And this record was carried evenly through a long life, affording a bright illustration of the sort of character the old-time Universalism was fitted to make.

We came to Dr. Clarke's little book* full-charged from his many and severe critics and prepared to dislike it and dissent from it. But we are not able in the main to do either. It seems to us a book to be read with great attention and profit by those for whom it is intended; namely, women themselves, and especially mothers and physicians. It does not seem to us a

*SEX IN EDUCATION; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls. By Edward H. Clarke M. D. etc. Osgood & Co. 181 pp. $1.25.

ings, we believe most heartily. Too much can never be claimed concerning the importance of health, and the religious duty of making its preservation a paramount object of life. Whatever interferes to any degree with physical development and healthy action is so far wrong. That is one of the self-evident truths that nobody in theory dreams of disputing; and wherever Dr. Clarke has paused to insist upon it, his pages are simply superfluous. But practically that the education of girls-and of boys too-does interfere with it, is also past discussion. That a thousand other things interferes with it is equally true, but since Dr. Clarke, while admitting all we may ask in this respect, limits his treatise expressly to the one topic we will follow him. And while he is far from admitting enough, as to the injury the schools may inflict on boys in their growing years, -for the five cases he cites of girls losing health and life by injudicious mental and physicial work, can be matched from the observation of any person of experience with an equal number of boys who have gone to their death from the same cause,— yet since he rules this out also, we must follow him again. Limiting the case still further to the seven years of girls in their teens, and omitting as our author is disposed to, the last two or three of these, he will still find women willing and eager to admit, if not all that he claims in regard to the necessary safeguards for health and strength, at least all that nature shall be found to require. Dr. Clarke cannot be as solicitous for the health of girls, on the broad ground of social welfare, as are, in each individual case, the parents who love them, and themselves for their own sake. Their fault is the fault of ignorance and false training, for which parents, teachers and physicians are more to blame than themselves; and parents and teachers sin ignorantly and heedlessly, rather than wilfully. Dr. Clarke does great injustice to a large and very noble part of community when he accuses them of trying obstinately to carry a reform against nature. The only point at issue is the question of remedy. Must we conclude with Dr. Clarke that since the physical constitution

of girls requires especial care, they cannot be educated save in a very limited and desultory manner? We believe the women of this and the coming generation will prove otherwise, as we know that multitudes of women in the past have proved otherwise. We see, to be sure, how logically he reaches his conclusions, but it is by the fallacy of taking certain things for granted that are by no means inevitable. He assumes, for instance, that co-education means that girls are to go to schools arranged with sole reference to boys. He finds the same error pervading not only the schools, higher and lower, where girls and boys are taught together, but in the schools where girls are taught by themselves; the boys' school and the the girls' school are one, and that one is the boys' school. And this state of things he virtually sets down as inevitable and fatal; to put beyond the high school a college course for girls would be to increase the evil to an alarming extent. Now this state of things does not seem to us to be inevitable at all, as we shall presently show. Again he assumes that a woman's entire education must be compassed during her teens, entirely ignoring the fact that most boys do not enter college younger than twenty, and that by common consent, that is quite too young. The time is coming, it is to be hoped, when we shall say, not college boys, but as they do now in Europe, University men: in that happy day, we may also have a race of university women, who shall graduate at twenty-five or twenty-seven with sound minds in sound bodies. No more mischievous faliacy has ever crept into public thinking, or become embodied in law, than that which holds the female as mature physically or mentally, at eighteen, as the male at twenty-one or twenty-five. This is an evil not bounded by the schoolroom. It is a general custom especially in country places, for girls to enter into all sorts of business at fourteen, and to be formally received into society when scarcely older, being esteemed as old as boys at seventeen and eighteen. Many a girl we have known to be entrusted with a country school at fourteen, but never a boy younger than seventeen. And more have died from this

premature assumption of life's cares and responsibilities than from simple overstudy. Nothing kills like worry, and no worry is like that of the immature and inexperienced, weighted with burdens they have not strength to lift. One of Dr. Clarke's five cases-that of the girl who entered Vassar College at fourteen and broke down after three years, is pertinent here. Not to make a point of the fact that this particular statement is untrue, no girl ever having been admitted to Vassar at that age, it proves, not what Dr. Clarke presumes, that the Vassar College course is ruinous to girls, but simply that no girl can do at fourteen what she might easily and safely at nineteen. We will go quite beyond Dr. Clarke and declare it criminal for any girl to be at any college or submitted to any severe strain of study at home or abroad, at fourteen years of age. The place for girls under sixteen or seventeen is at home with their mothers, and not in the tender mercies of any boarding-school whatsoever.

Let it be understood that when we plead for the opening of colleges to women, we mean not simply that the doors be set ajar, but that everything shall be granted that the case requires. The schools must cease to be boys' schools in any sense unfavorable to girls. We must insist upon it for the sake of justice even to the disadvantage of the boys if that were necessary; but we have no idea that it is necessary; on the contrary, the necessary changes would be as beneficial for them as for girls. We must insist upon it even at the expense of two millions more for Harvard College; but we can afford to laugh at that absurdity. Let the age for admission into colleges be carried up instead of down; let the elective system of studies prevail; let compulsory attendarce be wisely regulated or altogether superseded; let it be perceived that the universe will not collapse if students are not dragged up to five o'clock morning prayers, or compelled to stand during recitation, or be kept in high training for a boat race three months of the year; establish resident physicians, male and female, whose business it shall be not only to cure disease, but to prevent it,—and our

colleges will be not only suitable to young women, but a great deal better for young men than they are now. Nay, begin lower down in our educational system; put wise, motherly women on the school-boards who shall look after the welfare of pupils, girls and boys alike; if we have girls' schools, put at their head women sympathetic with their pupils, and considerate of their manysided nature, who shall be as anxious about pale cheeks as poor lessons,—instead of men with the driving business instinct of getting the utmost grind out of the machine they are running; abolish the criminal notion that ninety-five per cent. of attendance is a good thing for any school; make promotion depend not on daily marks, but on the average progress for a given period, as a term in a word, abate the whole high-pressure system, and make education, true to its name, a building up of the entire individual, broad, slow, even, genuine; and finally make it the imperative duty of somebody to detect the first symptoms of failing health, and so far as possible, to know constantly the state of health of each pupil ;and the problem of sex in education wlll require no further discussion.

We cannot leave the book without a

word of just censure. A part of the sharpness of criticism, especially from women, Dr. Clarke may attribute to the fact that no woman has been able to read his book without pain and offence at its repeated lapses in tone and allusion. Charity will for the present, strain a point to believe these unworthy of the author; but he ought by this time to be sufficiently penetrated by the fact, to purge future editions of these unpardonable blemishes.

— The new book put forth by Dr. Brocks* will be of interest not only to every member of the Universalist church, but, it seems to us, to a great body of Christians outside that church. Whoever desires to know what Universalists believe, and what the Universalist church stands for, will find it very clearly stated in this book. For there can be no question that in its statements

*OUR NEW DEPARTURE; or The Method and Work of the Universalist Church of America, as it enters on its Second Century. By Elbridge Gerry Brooks, D. D., Pastor of the Church of the Messiah, Phila. Boston: Universalist Publishing House. pp. 357. $175.

of doctrine it represents the almost universal belief and teaching of the church not only at the present time but through the greater part of its history. The doctrines in regard to Sin, Salvation, Conversion, Experimental Religion, Christ Essential as the guide and inspiration to the perfect life, treated in as many chapters, are intergral parts of the compact system of theology on which this church is founded, or rather into which it grew in the first half-century of its existence. If these have been too much overshadowed by the central doctrine of God's Fatherhood and the moving of his Providence towards good, it is less the fault of the church than the result of wilful misapprehension. The numbers inside the church have been few compared with the legion outside, who have maintained that Universalism meant only universal salvation, and that meant only an easy escape from deserved punishment. And these few have been the least intelligent and naturally the least religious of its membership. This false view of Universalism, or even the one-sided view which it caricatures, has not been the fault of Drs. Ballou and Thayer and Sawyer and Chapin and other strong minds, who with pen and voice have shaped its theology and commended it to the world.

That this central doctrine of the love of God has been presented too exclusively, in the broadcast preaching of the word, is a grievous error; but the error has been in the nature of the case, and has been outgrown and will be outgrown, without any specific new departure; the danger now is, possibly, that we may outgrow it too much. Dr. Brooks would not maintain that the love of God can be preached too much or too strongly, if preached in its proper relation to all other facts. If it appears less constantly in his pages than might be wished, it is doubtless because he is less penetrated with the needfulness of making this fact more prominent than it now is. But he makes it fully apparent that he is at one with his entire church in holding this to be the primal fact of all right theology. It seems to us also that he is simply abreast of his time in all the other tenets for which he pleads. We come a genera

tion later than Dr. Brooks, to be sure, but we never heard any different Universalism proclaimed than that he so strenuously insists upon. We cannot resist the impression,—as, on this and that point we follow the plea almost to agony for a new departure,-that this valiant conflict is chiefly with the ghosts of an outgrown past. "Faithful are the wounds of a friend," but we cannot feel that the wounds will strike as deep as perhaps the faithful friend that deals them is led to suppose. And it makes us a little sad that the general public must gain this impression from the book. For what is here pleaded for, as the theology of the future, seems to us we must repeat, the theology of the present. It is what the Universalist church almost universally stands for now, without any turning aside from its ancient truths, but only a growing up into more perfect knowledge. And more, it is the philosophy of the age, it is the common-sense of religious truth, apart from any sect or creed. This part of the book will be equally acceptable to the great body of the Unitarian church, and to all churches who do not build on the sacrifical "scheme;" and vast numLers in those churches, without full appreciation of the logic of their creeds, will find themselves in an "evangelical alliance" with all these truths. While the great moralists, if they do not reach to its spiritual side, have no contradiction of its philosophy. Very much of its entire argument is epitomized in a sentence of Emerson, "The only path of escape known in all the worlds of God is performance." And even the free thinkers of the time,-if any outside the church are freer than those withinfight their battle against a very different Christianity from this, and plant themselves for the fray on propositions very like many here declared. It is the position not of a single church, but of a vast multitude who, caught in the crowding press of modern thought, are by faith or blindly, touching anew the garment-hem of Christ.

That these truths need to be more vitally held, more wisely dispensed, more devotedly lived, is after all, the trumpet-call of the book; and here all believers must feel themselves in accord with the author, The

chapters on Consecration, Prayer, the Bible, are full of the deepest moment to the church addressed, and to all churches. The plea for growth in grace is the one plea that the church has always needed, and will need until the millennium. And in the connection here given, the appeal comes with deep and heart-moving reality and force.

The last chapters of the book, dealing with the methods of church work, limit themselves more to the sectarian element, and will be of less interest to the general reader. For this reason we could wish that the book had been two, with a separate treatment of doctrines to be preached, and of church work to be done. For here too, will be the widest field of difference with the author. There will always be differences of administration, even with the same spirit. For our own part we must put in an earnest dissent, from many of the views in the chapter entitled "Man and Woman," and shall find ourselves in large and excellent company in so doing. This wide difference of opinion the author of course anticipated. But we cannot think that in the shaping of many of his sentences, and the entire ex cathedra style of treatment of the subject, he quite realized the deep pain he was to inflict on many as devoted as himself to the welfare of their Zion.

But though there be many things in the book that will not receive the universal amen, yet, there is enough for thought, reflection and resolve, to commend it to every Universalist home. It is undoubtedly one of the most important books yet issued in the interests of the church, and will command a wide reading, both now and in the future. Its positions will be widely discussed, as the author naturally desires; all the more that they are "the expression of what is deepest in many minds and hearts among us." But any such thing as captious criticism, if anybody were moved to make it, would be disarmed by the tender and almost solemn words of the preface. Let us be grateful for the intimation that, Providence permitting, we have not here to pronounce the final verdict, however favorable that might be. Welcome the books

-

to come. And if one who has studied the methods of the preacher for forty years shall in these future pages give us less of the preacher's eloquence, more of the essayist's unrhetoric statement, it shall be, we must think, not to their disadvantage. - A volume of poems from the daughter of a Universalist minister commends itself for that reason, if for no other, to the attention of the Universalist public. Mrs. Griswold's poems* will commend themselves for reasons of their own. Our readers for the last five years have known something of their merits; also something of their author's appreciation of the dramatic element and skill in its use, from the wierd story of "Fate and Faith," published in these pages in 1870. Universalist papers in the West have given the public still more of Mrs. Griswold's poems; but the greater part of her work, both in prose and verse, has appeared in the literary periodicals,— extending from the days of The Knickerbocker, where "Hattie Tyng" was early a favored name, through Grahams, the Home Journal, Harper's, Scribner's, the Woman's Journal and other publications. The name of Hattie Tyng is also well known in many of the local journals of the West, especially in her own state of Wisconsin. To meet a long standing demand, she now gathers these drifting poetic productions and unites them in a daintilyprinted volume which she modestly calls "Apple-Blossoms." Here may be found the little song "Under the Daisies" that has been sung in all the parlors in the land, and commended to fame by an engraving in the Art Journal; "Three Kisses," repeatedly attributed to Mrs. Browning as it has drifted through the newspapers; the stirring war-lyrics, "Marches" first published in Harper's Weekly, "Dead,” “Little Billy," the "Nation's Dead," all of which have won the immortality of the poet's corner and the scrap-book, second only to that of the reading book. But the prevailing themes are love and faith, and a little too constantly and sadly, life's mysteries and illusions.

APPLE BLOSSOMS. By Hattfe Tyng Griswold. Milwaukee: Strickland & Co. pp. 232. $1.50. For sale at the Universalist Publishing House, Boston.